Chapter 3 - The Mother Who Stopped Answering
The next morning, Abigail sat across from Elaine Parker, an attorney whose office occupied the second floor of a converted brick house in Clayton.
Elaine had handled Abigail’s husband’s estate six years earlier. She studied the loan notice, the invoice files, and the lottery ticket without reacting until Abigail finished speaking.
“First, the ticket goes into a safe-deposit box,” she said. “Second, you freeze your credit. Third, you stop communicating with Spencer about money.”
“He’s still in the hospital.”
“He has doctors. What he doesn’t need is access to your accounts.”
They called the lender together. The bank’s fraud representative confirmed the application had been submitted electronically from an IP address registered to Riley Print & Sign. The signature had been uploaded as an image.
Abigail remembered signing a hospital privacy form on Spencer’s tablet during an emergency-room visit. He had held the screen flat and told her where to place her finger.
By noon, her credit was frozen and the loan was under review.
At three, Spencer began calling.
At four, he contacted Reverend Paul at Maplewood Community Church and said his mother had disappeared after promising to help with his discharge expenses.
By evening, Abigail’s phone contained messages from church friends asking whether she was confused, ill, or overwhelmed.
One woman wrote, A sick child isn’t the time for tough love.
Spencer was thirty-four, but to the people who had watched him grow up, he was still Abigail’s sick boy.
She sat at her kitchen table, the same table where she had once sorted coupons to afford his school shoes, and listened to his voicemail.
“Mom, I don’t know what’s going on with you. The nurses keep asking where you are. People are worried.”
His voice sounded fragile again.
Then, near the end, his tone hardened.
“You told me you had something important. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
Abigail deleted nothing. Elaine had instructed her to preserve every message.
The hospital’s billing department sent an itemized statement that afternoon. Spencer’s real out-of-pocket balance for the past seven months was three thousand two hundred eighteen dollars.
It had already been paid.
Abigail compared the statement with Naomi’s fake invoices. One detail kept appearing on the forged documents: a small code in the lower-right corner, MCC-47.
May you like
She had seen those letters before.
They were printed on the envelopes Spencer had prepared for the church’s Christmas donation drive.
